Watch Cal Fish’s Charged Video for “Autobiography #4”

Upstate NY resident Cal Fish has done a good deal of traveling—both literal and sonic—over the past few years, as a member of the dreamy psych-pop act Turnip King and in live sessions with Jerry Paper‘s jazz band. Now the guitar and flute ace is preparing to release a debut record that’s just as melodically oriented as his collaborative projects but which foregrounds his knack for intricate, woozy sonic layering. The video for “Autobiography #4,” the second single from Cassette Traveler, is an amalgam of home videos, found footage, and clips from American politics that maps Fish’s emotionally charged lyrics onto a broad and dark landscape. This is his fourth version of the same piece, made alongside video installations and two-channel video performances, and it’s apparent that the music and visuals were conceptualized in a process of mutual feedback. Broken guitar riffs and pitch-shifting synths osmose into the VHS static, bestowing a sense of unrest, of helplessness against a shifting climate. Still, the whole piece retains the familiarity of a home movie, and there’s comfort in “a belief in return.”